


Count Your Blessings, She’s Coming For You

by akingdomofunicorns



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Sexual Content, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 14:40:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/863159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akingdomofunicorns/pseuds/akingdomofunicorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gendry thinks she might come back, one day, when all is well. And she does. She comes to him half dead and unforgiving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Count Your Blessings, She’s Coming For You

They’re all dead, all those who once mattered to the rest of the world: King Robb and his lords, the Starks, the soldiers… Even the Lady is dead, as much as the undead can be. She is oft seen by the river, with her grey skirts surrounding her grey body and the dried blood clinging to the rotten skin of her opened neck. Dead as she can be, naught of the lady of old in her, not a trace of her daughter in her eyes, in the shape of her mouth, in her throaty whispers of revenge. She is not much of a lady, this Lady Stoneheart who thirsts for blood, just a walking corpse who can still feel the faint smell of her prey far away, the echo of a mother who once fought for her children and who’s come back to keep fighting for all that’s left. There’s not much left, either, the eldest daughter, mayhaps, though no one knows where she is, this Sansa Stark, and the youngest too, if by some chance Arya Stark survived the Twins or never made it there. A foolish hope, Gendry knows, where would she go but back to the Brotherhood, back to _him_? A foolish hope, but it still clings to his skin like soot from his forge.

He looks after the orphans, helps Jeyne and Willow at the inn, he pounds the steel like his master taught him, back at King’s Landing, and it feels as if he’s a boy of four-and-ten again —there’s no day but today, no meal but the one he has in his belly, no morrow to hope for, just the forge and the orphans and the Heddles, just the hammer in his hands and the steel under it, just the fires to keep him warm and the muscles in his arms to keep them all alive. The Brotherhood comes and goes, and sometimes he goes with them when he’s feeling restless, when her eyes keep haunting him in his dreams, when Jeyne looks at him like she knows he’s not sleeping, when Willow talks a little too loudly and moves a certain way. He’s not made for war, he’s a smith, he builds, he creates, but blood is blood, and sometimes he needs it.

The night the wolves start howling, really start howling as if the woods have been set on fire, the orphans hide in their rooms and he has to drag Lem away from under Jeyne’s skirts. The man’s too drunk to realise he’s making a spectacle of himself and Gendry feels like breaking his nose again, just like Arya did years ago, when they were last together. He doesn’t, he _can’t_ , less the wolves start coming for them at the scent of blood; there’s not much food in the woods these days, not with all the snow piled atop the soil. Winter has come with a vengance for nobles and smallfolk alike, for the southerners who once dared to stand against the Starks, and the northernmen have started to wake from their lethargy, bears and giants and mermen coming down from their mountains and their ice towers, emerging from the sea to put the traitors and turncloaks to the sword, to burn the perfumed lords in their castles and feed their sons and daughters to the pigs.

“The Starks are always right in the end,” Thoros had said when the first snows had come to the Riverlands, “winter comes for everyone and everything. And while we’re left shivering and dying, praying to our Lord of Light to save us, the wolves will come again, fiercer and stronger and terrible.”

“There are no wolves left,” had been Tom’s response, “no wolves, just us.”

Gendry doesn’t believe it —Lady Stoneheart came back for something, the Lord of Light brought her back for a reason, for sure, to find her daughters (Arya, for she’s alive, she must be, she has to be, alive and safe from the bastard of the North) and avenge her house and bring peace to her battered soul. The wolves will come again, he knows, he’s seen it in Thoros’ flames, he feels it in his bones, under his skin, against his flesh. And he can hear them howl every night not two steps away from them.

* * *

They never attack, these beasts, but he sees them prowling around the inn, hears their breaths and feels them hot and warm against the window of the forge.

A small group of brothers returns from robbing supplies from some Frey men and he sees Jeyne run to her new husband, Willow at her heels; he thinks it’s pretty, how sometimes Jeyne smiles just a bit more when Harn looks at her for a little too long. He finds it sad, that he could have had her, her or Willow, had he asked —his forge and a wife and a family, a babe perhaps; but he’s glad he didn’t. Winter hangs over their heads, thick and heavy and final, and the ground is too frozen to dig it proper, even if the grave’s for a small babe.

He starts to hear rumors, then, of Sansa Stark killing the lord regent of the Vale and loosing her own life to moon tea, of a little lord come to retake his family’s castle and of a Lord Commander on the brink of death. He likes those rumors, they fuel his anger and his hope and they strengthen the lady, who almost smiles at the knowledge of one of her sons having survived and hisses at the news of her daughter’s death. There are no news of Arya, but they have a new purpose, stronger than ever, and he can almost taste it, the feeling of belonging from those bygone days.

They ride North at the lady’s command in search of King Brandon Stark, the sixth of his name, King in the North and rightful heir of Winterfell. Bran the Broken, the southerners call him, Bran the Brave, is what the children whisper when they speak of him, Bran the Warg, is what his people seem to prefer —his direwolf is his legs and his eyes in the dark. _Arya’s direwolf is still out there somewhere_ , he thinks, _I could find it and then she’d come back to me_.

He’s full of foolish hopes and stupid thoughts, but the thought licks at his brain and lingers in between his shoulderblades, like a hammer beating him down into submission. Just once, it would be just once: she’d see through her wolf’s eyes just like her brother seems to do and she’d see him, _him_ by her wolf’s side, _him_ fighting the Freys and the Boltons and the Lannisters, _him_ avenging her family and fighting for her, and perhaps she’d come back to him. She would, if only just to tell him to stand side-face.

The wolves like to howl, they howl when he’s trying to sleep and when he’s keeping guard, they howl all night long and even when the sun starts to rise, they howl nonstop as if announcing something, at the full moon and at the black sky. They howl and he cringes and he waits.

* * *

 

They march North, past Riverrun and the Twins, always in the dark, in disguise, hanging those Freys who cross their path. Some deserve it and some don’t, he stopped caring when the odds abandoned them, when the northerners were slaughtered at the Red Wedding, when Arya disappeared just to be taken by the Hound, when the smallfolk attacked the Lady Brienne and tried to tear her apart when she was too weak to fight them back, when the butcher cut Podrick Payne’s left arm from the elbow, when they killed that boy of barely ten that travelled with some Freys… The Brotherhood without Banners fought for a noble cause once, but noble causes die fast and they die hard.

Somehow they get to White Harbour, where the Lord of the castle holds Moat Cailin with the crannognmen of Greywater Watch. When Lord Manderly sees the lady, when Thoros of Myr tells him who she was, the tears spill from his eyes and down his fat cheeks like they would from a babe.

“You can’t… She’s not… Lady Stark is dead.”

“They slashed her throat and threw her naked in the river,” Thoros says, walking to the lady’s side with unnerved by the mortality she _breaths_ , “and Lord Beric Dondarrion gave his life so the Lord of Light could bring her back. She is King Brandon’s mother, she wishes to go to him and we follow her.”

The lady brings her hands to her throat and presses against the slash.

“Bran,” she whispers. It’s harder to understand her by the day, but her son’s name is clear on her lips and frozen on their skins. The word caresses them with nasty and bony fingers and kisses their brows with its rotten sighs.

“The King in the North is in Deepwood Motte along the Glovers, but we will not go there —we will meet in Winterfell,” Ser Wylis says from under his father’s seat, “we are marching openly against the Boltons.”

Lord Manderly nods at his son’s words, not daring to say anything. Gendry sees the faint trace of a scar in his neck and he thinks of the one the lady bears, all puckered, grey skin, like the frills on the sleeves of her dress.

“My lady,” Lord Manderly whispers, looking at Lady Stoneheart with sorrowful eyes, “your youngest, Rickon, lives. I sent Lord Davos Seaworth to find him and bring him back from Skagos.”

“Rickon.”

“The boy…” Ser Wylis starts, “The boy is back with his protector, a wildling woman who calls herself Osha, the Onion Knight is gone to Deepwood Motte to treat with the King in the North, the Boltons rule from within the walls of Winterfell and the North remembers.”

The lady looks at all of them with the eyes of a mad woman and the hope of a young maiden.

“Winter. Family.”

* * *

King Brandon is young still, barely a man of three-and-ten, but his eyes tell different tales. He has a queen, too, a short and slim girl with long, brown hair and green eyes. When they first see her, she’s wearing a breastplate with the direwolf of the Starks and the black lizard-lion of the Reeds engraved in it and a dress of dark green wool underneath it. The King rides towards them on the back of his direwolf with a crown on his head and the lady chokes.

“Bran,” she whispers, like she’s done a dozen of times since they began their journey north.

He bends before the King in the North along his brothers and prays that said king doesn’t hang them for destroying his mother.

“Mother, this is my wife, Queen Meera.”

The Queen curtsies to Lady Stoneheart and Gendry grimaces at the normality with which they handle her existance. The lady stretches her arms towards the son she once thought dead, long ago, back at the beginning of the war and he thinks that mayhaps she’s not yet totally dead.

 _Family_ , he thinks while dining on a rabbit leg once they’ve set camp with the rest of the soldiers, _all she ever wanted was family, like Arya_.

* * *

Word spreads around Westeros that the lord of the Crossing was hanged along many of his sons and grandsons and no one knows who it was. A name comes to his mind, Jaqen H’ghar, Arya’s dangerous friend back in their days on the Kingsroad and Harrenhal.

He smiles when they tell him —not because they’re dead, not because they’re Freys, he’s really tired of all that, but because she is _back_.

* * *

He feels like throwing up. The King’s tent is the biggest and it sits in the center of the camp. He wants to go in, he wants to speak with Arya’s younger brother, but he can’t. He’s just a soldier —no, not even a soldier; he’s just a _bastard blacksmith_. He’s about to turn around when the Queen comes out.

“Did you want something, Ser Gendry?”

“I… I… Your Grace,” he stammers, bending the knee immediately.

“Please,” she says and smiles at him, “the King was waiting for you.”

She makes him stand and enter the tend. King Brandon sits behind a table with a cup of wine in his hands and a crown of steel and copper on his head. He goes to bend the knee, but the Queen puts a hand on his elbow to stop him.

“Have a seat with me, Ser.”

He sits in silence before the King (he shouldn’t, he knows little of etiquette, but he’s sure he shouldn’t despite the King’s smile) and the Queen goes to stand behind her husband’s chair. She’s pretty, of an age with him, he imagines, with soft edges, a kind smile and lively eyes. He’s seen how the bannermen look at her: in awe and suspicion at the same time (some call her and her brother frog-eaters, mud people, swamp-dwellers, but they don’t seem to mind much, though he’s never seen the Queen’s brother), and not that she’s the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen (there was this girl in Flea Bottom that had green eyes and brown skin and black, glossy waves that made men go mad, and Arya was as pretty as the Queen with her acorn dress, her messy hair and her steel grey eyes), but she has _something_ that turns heads.

“You knew Arya,” the King says and at his surprise he smiles, “I’ve seen it.”

“I did, Your Grace.”

“And why did you come today? What do you know of her?”

Gendry hesitates.

“Nothing, Your Grace.”

The King smiles, knowingly, and quietly asks his cup bearer to pour some wine for his guest. The goblet in which it’s served could probably feed the orphans for five years straight if he sold it; it would have put food in his belly when he was a boy starving in Flea Bottom. His hands shake as he takes it.

“And yet you are here, are you not? You believe you know something of Princess Arya and you wanted to tell me. I dreamed it and so I was waiting for you.”

Gendry takes a deep breath before raising his eyes from the table.

“I believe she was… I believe she was the one who killed Lord Frey, Your Grace.”

He’s never spoken to a King before —to Lord Arryn and Lord Stark, yes, who were both Hands of the King, to Beric Dondarrion, who was a lord and to Arya, who was a lady _and_ a princess, but not at all, but never to a King. He feels restless, he knows he’s done something wrong, he just _knows_ it.

“Why?”

“I… Well, I… I don’t know.”

“If it was her, she’ll come to me, then, sooner or later she’ll come. You may leave.”

He’s nearly out when the King calls his name.

“Ser Gendry, I believe that was her too.”

* * *

She comes to him half dead and unforgiving.

(Her hair is long and messy and braided and her eyes are the same steely grey he remembers.)

She’s thin and pale and weak and she has to lean on her wolf to walk. He knows it’s her the moment she walks into the camp and her wolf runs towards Summer. He knows it’s her even though her hair is longer and she carries no weapons —no swords or knives as far as he can see.

“I knew it was you, m’lady.”

She seems to smile, but he’s not sure about it, because her bottom lip trembles, her eyes go white and her legs give in to her weight. He’s right there to catch her —right under the King’s eyes, as he’s watching with the Queen by his side— and she feels sharp and cold against his chest. But she’s back and it’s almost as if the Lord of Light cares about them all.

* * *

They fear she might not wake up, but after three days she opens her eyes to see her brother leaning over her. He sits in a corner fiddling with some trinkets from the forge.

“We rode so fast,” she croaks, her voice hoarse from the days she must’ve spent alone.

“I know.”

“Sansa?”

“They say she’s dead, we don’t know.”

“I dreamed of her. I did, I loved… Sister.”

“We know, Arya. Close your eyes, sleep some more.”

She closes her eyes and falls asleep in two seconds flat.

* * *

They try to feed her some soup —nothing heavy, just the water left from boiling vegetables, but she doesn’t hold half of it in. He makes her drink water before she falls asleep again and then joins the King’s maester. The old man thinks mayhaps some mother’s milk will keep her fed and strengthen her health, but Gendry always heard wise women tell tales of milk rotting a weak stomach back when he lived in Flea Bottom. The Maester is wiser than those women though (or so Thoros tells him) and a woman with full breasts is called to feed the princess. It doesn’t work either.

The Manderlys tell them to boil water and seaweed together and it seems the mermen know something after all. They feed her seaweed soup twice a day for two weeks straight before they start smashing nuts so she can eat between the two meals. She starts speaking again, though she doesn’t say much, and he nurses her back to health as best as he can. He’s a smith, he builds, he creates, he repairs. He thinks mayhaps, when they’re both old and wrinkled, he might kiss her on the lips.

* * *

He leaves her to retake Winterfell when the maester says she’s allowed to get up from bed. He knows she won’t forgive him, but he’d like to serve her her home on a silver platter when she gets there. She writes to her brother and the King asks him to sit by his side while he reads the letters out loud. The Queen writes to her husband too, but those letters are kept private.

The fight is terrible; they loose fifteen men for every mile they gain (a small number, but too many all the same) and he takes an arrow to the shoulder and another to the thigh that leave him abed for nigh to a fortnight. He fears he won’t ever get to kiss Arya, but in the end he’s able to grab a hammer proper and swing it against the flayed men. He likes how their bones crush under his blows.

The Umbers (what’s left of them after the Red Wedding and the reign of the Boltons, King Brandon tells him) and the Karstarks under Lady Alys’ command join them in battle and the War of the North is won. 

* * *

The Onion Knight arrives with the Princess Shireen before the Queen and Arya make it to Winterfell to speak in the name of King Stannis again (he knows who he is, Lady Brienne told him before he-) and he fears there’ll be another war to fight.

Queen Meera and Arya arrive a moon’s turn later alongside King Stannis, who comes with a woman clad in red robes and a grey queen by his side. He takes a look at him at Lord Davos insistance, scowls and declares him the bastard of a king, but a bastard nonetheless.

Arya’s brother likes it when he’s there to attend councils, to speak for the smallfolk, and so he’s there when the Baratheon King sits with the King in the North, Queen Meera, Jojen Reed, Princess Arya, the Red Priestess Melisandre and his Lord Hand.

“The Iron Throne is mine by rights and you will put down your crown and fight by my side like your father fought by my brother’s side.”

“The Iron Throne is yours,” Jojen Reed agrees and it is the first time Gendry has heard him speak, “but you will not sit upon it. Your place is in the North, fighting at the Wall.”

“Some Kings don’t wear crowns,” Arya says, looking lost and sad, “some Kings die young and some don’t become Kings at all. And some men are no Kings at all. We’re making the realm bleed. Mayhaps we can all fight with the dragons and defeat the Lannisters for once and for all. Avenge Father and Mother and Robb and Sansa. The lady would like that. Mother would. They were our family and it is our duty to honour them.”

He wants to embrace her small frame in his arms, but he keeps quiet like everyone in the room.

“You will not sit the Throne,” Jojen says again, “but perhaps your daughter will.”

* * *

King Stannis leaves his daughter behind where it’s safe and warm and he goes North to the Wall followed by his army and a thousand northerners under Ser Wylis and Lord Robett Glover’s command. Arya hides in the rebuilt forge after the King forbids her to go North to Jon Snow and she sits quietly beside his cot. It’s uncanny how quiet she is —he can see it in her eyes, that she’s going back to a place where she doesn’t want to be, but that she doesn’t know how to escape.

Gendry grabs a sword form the anvil and swings it to test its balance; it’s off, like he expected it to be.

“The balance is still off,” he tells her, concentrating on the words he’s using so the idea he’s trying to convey doesn’t fall flat on Arya’s ears, “because I still have work to do. But it will be right in the end, once I’m done with it, fine for war and for battle.”

Arya rolls her eyes and heads towards the door without uttering a word. He likes how she looks standing in his forge (the King had given it to him once it was rebuilt with the promise of a quiet life, constant food in his belly and the protection of Winterfell), all pretty and young and sharp, a lady at last, with a dress of white and grey wool and red satin ribbons, a gift from the Queen to her beloved good-sister.

“Where are you going?”

“To speak with Bran. Come with me, he likes you.”

He goes with her to the King’s solar, where he sits with his Queen and the Lady Mormont, recently arrived at Winterfell with her youngest daughter Lyanna. He’s learning the big names of the North and Arya says the sooner he does, the easier it will be for him to adapt to their home. He knows Prince Rickon has taken to Lady Lyanna, he grabs at her skirts, bites at her wrists and tries to steal the axe she wears at her back. The girl is a year younger than Arya, but taller, with fuller cheeks and broader of shoulders, yet graceful and soft and extremely sweet when she’s with the Prince.

“This is Ser Gendry of the Hollow Hill,” the King says, and the ladies stand to curtsy for the Princess and him.

Gendry bows and Arya curtsies back before turning to her brother.

“I can’t stay here, I need to go North to Jon.”

“No.”

“Bran!”

“I will send you South with Ser Gendry and a party of trusted men to parley with this self-proclaimed Aegon Targaryen.”

“My place is in the North.”

“We must seal an alliance with the Targaryens and I need you to break a marriage deal.”

“You will not dare!”

“Your Grace,” Lady Mormont calls, “the last time a Stark woman was near a Targaryen men-”

Gendry can feel the vile rise to his throat at the thought of Arya marrying a _King_. She would be Queen Arya Targaryen, a Queen of Six Kingdoms, a wife and later a mother to someone else’s babes. And he’s never thought much of a life with Arya beyond making swords for her brother and wrestling matches in his forge, but he sees now it were all foolish hopes on his part. Perhaps this is why he imagines her clad in a red dress with her hair all coiled and braided atop her head, with a worn grey cloak on her shoulders and a babe with blue eyes and dark hair suckling at her breast; perhaps this is why he imagines her naked underneath his fingertips, with her body wreathing below him and his cock buried deep within her heat; perhaps this is why he imagines her sleeping beside him, both of them old and grey and slow, but childish nonetheless; perhaps this is why he realises he loves her, has loved her for many years, ever since she was nine or maybe ten and he was almost a man grown, until now when she is four-and-ten and he’s nine-and-ten already, almost twenty, a man of his own making.

He has loved her when they were together and when they were apart, while kissing a girl between the thighs and taking himself in hand to relieve the ache, while hunting Freys and following Lady Stoneheart and staying behind to take care of the orphans. He has loved her in the childish way she had taught him, with the hopes of a boy half his age and the wisdom of the ones who had fallen before him.

“The marriage won’t be between Starks and Targaryens, I assure you all,” the King says, looking at his sister, and Gendry feels the weight on his chest disappear. “We will offer him the Princess Shireen.”

“She’s a Baratheon,” Lady Mormont says, unbelieving, “he won’t want _her_.”

“She’s a princess, the daughter of the rightful King of Westeros, who will give up his crown if Aegon marries his daughter.”

“Aegon Targaryen is fighting this war because he believes _he_ is the rightful king of the Seven Kingdoms.”

“But he isn’t,” Arya concedes and Gendry would like to agree, but he doesn’t understand politics, let alone legitimacy, “by right of conquest the Baratheons are the rightful monarcs, Stannis is the rightful king and Shireen his heir. If he marries a Baratheon the Stormlands will bow to him, the North will ally with his troops and the Vale will withdraw from the war, leaving the Lannisters alone.”

“The Tyrells have closed the Reach ever since they smuggled the Queen out of King’s Landing and they won’t wait long before they throw her at the Targaryen King. You must leave as soon as possible and convince him to take Shireen as his wife and send a dragon to the Wall to fight off the Others.”

“Two wars at the same time, Bran? This won’t end well.”

“It will end in peace, sister, and that is what matters.”

* * *

She comes to his room a fortnight after leaving Winterfell.

“Do you think me pretty?”

He can smell the wine on her breath, or perhaps it’s his own, he’s not sure, all he knows is that she looks at him with doe eyes and pink lips and she’s never looked as sweet and as beautiful. Her hair is braided over her shoulder and her skin is rubbed clean, all pink and shiny. She wears a nightgown of white and grey silks, with the grey direwolf of the Starks sewed at her breast and a robe of furs to cover her modesty. She looks pure and innocent, like a maid from a song, and wild, like a wolf from the forrests.

“I do.”

“And beautiful?”

Her lips are so close to his he can almost taste them. They’re like rosebuds and her cheeks are flushed pink like a babe’s.

“Yes.”

He wants to kiss her, he does, he wants it so much. It’s not the wine that has gotten to his head, he’s wanted it for too long.

“I think you handsome too,” she says, getting on her tip-toes and brushing her mouth against his in the gentlest of touches, “and brave and strong and loyal. I think of you a lot.”

He kisses her because he can, because they’re young and alive and he’s in love with her. He kisses her because she’s Arya and he can live without her, he’s done it before, but he doesn’t want to. He kisses her because he knows this might be his only chance to do so.

He gets her to the bed with the desperation of a drowning man and he undresses her slowly, peeling every piece of clothing from her body with gentle and shaking hands. He might be in love with her shoulders, full of tiny, orange freckles, so soft and round, perfect for kissing and biting; he might be in love with the hollow of her collarbone, where he can deep his tongue and collect the beats of sweat that go running down her neck; he might be in love with her breasts and her brownish-pink nipples and that dark brown freckle on the right breast, right where it is joined with her arm.

He kisses down her body, suckles at her breasts like a babe, leaves purple blooms on her pale skin, grazes his teeth down her belly and parts her legs. He kisses her inbetween the legs, kisses her there until her lips are full and swollen pink, until she’s trembling and pliant under him, until she’s peaked thrice in a row.

“Gendry,” she moans, scratching at his scalp, “please, please. I-”

He wants to make this good for her, he’s never been through with it, never done it with none of the women he’s kissed, even though he’s kissed them down there. But the truth is he’s never felt comfortable enough with anyone to undress before them and he’s not sure he’ll be able to make this good for Arya. But she will guide him and he will teach her to enjoy herself.

Her body is full of silver scars and he kisses them before sinking into her. She’s wet and slippery and warm and so eager. He spends himself inside of her before he can bring her to the edge, and then he gets out of her and crawls down her body to her sex, where he licks and sucks before sinking his fingers inside of her, curling them upwards and flicking his tongue over the pearl at her apex. He leaves her shaking and sweaty and salty tears stream down her face to her chin.

She curls her body against his under the furs and kisses him in the corner of his mouth.

“I dreamed of you, sometimes, while I was away. I saw your face right beside the ones of my family and I had to work so hard to remeber your names. You always came after Rickon and before Jory Cassel and Hot Pie.”

She tells him a bit of her past that night and when she’s done he tries to make her forget with the help of his mouth and his fingers.

He wakes with his cock in her mouth and he thinks he could get used to waking up like this.

* * *

There’s a long way before them and two wars on both sides of the continent, but Arya smiles wickedly when they get to the Neck and pulls him towards a godswood, where they kneel before a Heart tree and exchange made up vows that bound them together in life and even after. He takes her there on the earth, in a bed of leaves and grass and melting snow. Later Arya opens a letter form her brother the King and laughs at how he congratulates them on their shameless love.

“Will you help me, Gendry? Will you help me avenge my family?”

“We will make the remaining Lannisters tremble when they hear your name. They already do, you know?”

“They do?”

“Word has spread that you were the one who hanged Lord Frey in his own castle.”

“They best start chanting their prayers, I am coming for them.”

“They best.”

“I might love you,” she says, flushing from head to toe and smiling shyly at him.

“I might let you.”

 _Count your blessings_ , he thinks, kissing her neck where the blood pulses hot with life, _she won’t forget, she won’t forgive_.


End file.
